I think changing to OLED screens is the next logical step toward that?

Personally I wish there were display options sans backlight.

On my white iBook, it was possible to see what's on the screen, even when backlight was turned off, through the translucent apple logo, if the display was lit from the back, by the sun or a lamp.

I always wished there was a display that could be lit by an external lightsource, e.g. a library lamp.

I would love to see a display with, say, 8 primaries instead of 3. With a careful choice of pixel pattern, it should be possible to get much wider color gamut (especially among intense light reds and blue-green colors which are very poorly supported by “RGB” displays), without causing the metamerism problems that very colorful 3-primary displays have. Unfortunately there’s a big chicken–egg problem since images and other content are all created with the expectation of current display technology.

They definitely don’t want to completely drop the short-wavelength primary for many purposes, but it would be nice to have a “late night writing mode” where that is possible.

There is no chicken-and-egg problem because the OS already does color management to map your source color space (sRGB, mostly) to your target monitor's color space. If it didn't, you wouldn't be able to view sRGB content correctly on wide-gamut monitors, for example.

The real challenge is in developing display backlight and phosphor technology to reproduce colors outside of the standard gamuts.

No, there’s a very serious chicken-and-egg problem. The gamut of RGB displays (televisions, projectors, computer and smartphone displays, etc.) has some parts which are very wide and other parts which are very limited. All content produced in the past 20 years expects to be displayed on such displays. If you increase the intensity of the existing “RGB” (orangish-red R, yellowish-green G, purplish-blue B) primaries, you get a display with a substantially similar gamut to existing displays, but with an ability to make certain colors marginally more intense. This is easy for content authors to target using existing workflows, and even potentially possible to adapt existing content for without too much disruption.

If you invent a new type of display with a radically different color gamut, and then take existing content and amp up the intensity on hue/value regions with a newly wider gamut, you throw off all of the content creators intentions for color relationships. Total non-starter.

What you can do is show old content about the same as it was on past displays, but then there’s not really any advantage to going with the new technology, which is typically going to be more difficult and expensive to produce. A new display needs new content in order to work differently from past displays.

(Believe me: I have spent years studying human vision and color reproduction technologies. I’m not just making this up.)

If you’re curious about the topic of gamut mapping in general, I recommend this 300-page book, http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-047003032... The gamut mapping algorithms used in most common software systems (e.g. Adobe Photoshop) are actually quite poor.